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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Some of you may be aware I’ve been working on a game called Skyway for the past several months. This has been a huge step for me as I’ve finally gotten really close to completing a project! I just announced it on Steam Greenlight,

I’m still hard at work on my latest game Skyway, which you may remember. I’ve just made an IndieDB page which will hold screenshots and updates! The game is a bit behind schedule but it should be officially announced sometime this month, and should release before 2017.

Please check it out! I’m pretty worried about what people will think of it come announcement time, so feedback is appreciated!

Hello LD! It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here, and sorry to barge in on the Mini LD 😛 You might remember me from 2013. And from previous entries!

The past few years I’ve been working on huge games and then scrapping them due to immense scale/poor time budgeting. I think that’s something many of you can relate to. It seemed like every project I started, I reduced the scale by half and it was still out of my scope But I finally sat down and really thought about the whole process. After a bunch of failures and coding practice, I came up with a solution.

Making games is an iterative process. Instead of holding on to everything until release, I’ve decided to show more of my works in progress. And instead of fine tuning the gameplay for ages, I’ve decided to just literally make the game–no matter how bad it turns out. Iterative means once I have the whole thing done, I make improvements to everything until I’m satisfied. It took me way too long to figure that out, and it’s an ideology that really helped me in my projects.

Without further ado, here’s a work in progress showcase of a game I’m working on called Skyway!

I do have tons of other half-finished projects that I plan on showing, but for now I’m totally focused on this title. And, of course, I’ll share more about Skyway in the upcoming weeks

First off, it’s a been a long time since I’ve been active here xD Forgive my absence, I’ve been working on perfecting my skills and some really large projects that may finally release sometime within the next several months! Here’s a quick preview:

As you can tell, the past several months for me have been about improving my games in terms of graphics and visuals/effects. I’ve learned that detailed worlds take hours and hours of hard work detailing even the smallest, unseen items. And I’ve learned tricks to work around modeling every item, such as repetition and implication. However, I’m not here to talk about my new game, I’m here to ponder why the gaming community has changed, specifically within the past year.

Improving the graphics in my own game made me think…

Why are people so obsessed with graphics?

E3 2015 just ended, and all I heard about the smaller games was “What??? This is 2015, games should look better!!” I’ve seen hundreds upon hundreds of comments about Fallout 4 and how it looks “bad” or “I’m not getting this because it’s no better than Skyrim.” Now whether you think Fallout 4 looks bad or not, the point here is why care? When Minecraft was released did people bash it for its graphics? No, because the focus was on gameplay and innovative mechanics. There was also a stylistic decision to the 32-bit look.

When I play a game, for example Shadow of Mordor, I don’t play to watch stunning visuals. Sure, it’s awesome to have something that’s nice to look at, and the particle effects make gameplay more satisfying, but in the end… I play to unlock more upgrades. Or I play to advance the story. Or I play to see all the unique bosses generated. Some developers have claimed that graphics pull in the audience, and mechanics keep them there.

But why has it become a competition? Why are downgrades and optimizations and particle counts making/breaking the game for some people? Why does it matter what resolution your shadows are or how many polygons your characters have? I’ve always gone by the rule that the graphics in your game should fit your game. But I’m seeing people that hate Watch Dogs because the shadow quality was lowered for the final release. And I just don’t understand why.

Why do Resolutions/Framerates/Specs matter?

Yes, I’d much rather play a game at 60fps. Yes, I’d much rather play a game at 1080p. But why is it causing people to cancel pre-orders? Fallout 4 was just announced to be 30fps on consoles. Can you guess the comments? “Unacceptable for a 2015 game!” “Bethesda sucks! These are current gen consoles!”

People don’t seem to want to accept any framerate lower than 60 for anything, even if it means not playing one of the most anticipated games of the year. And I don’t understand why it matters in the slightest. As someone who grew up with games running in a 400×600 window, I can get immersed in any decently made game, no matter the resolution or framerate. I played Mount and Blade with a constant 23fps in 400×600 stretched fullscreen just a year ago, and it’s still my favorite multiplayer game of all time.

What is it about gamers these days that they won’t accept lower specs? It’s not even that they care about the gameplay or mechanics… they just care about the graphics and the “hours of gameplay”. They want something that looks good and lasts a long time with “new content”. Maybe it’s just because I’m a developer, and this is hate towards developers… Or maybe I’m not as spoiled as some of the gamers out there nowadays. But to me everyone seems to be angry.

Why do Gamers hold Grudges against Companies?

Finally, I’d like to address Ubisoft. Literally everyone hates Ubisoft. Why? I have no clue.

They’re mad at the Watch Dogs downgrade. They’re mad at the quality of Assassin’s Creed Unity. They’re mad at the glitches in Assassin’s Creed Unity. They’re mad at the length of the South Park game. They’re mad at… what exactly?

Sure, none of the items above are good. But they were things expected of a company like this. Companies are not evil, they’re not out to get you, they just want money. And they’re going to take action to make the most money no matter what, so why is everyone upset when they do something like this? Konami confirmed microtransactions in Metal Gear Solid 5. Suddenly people are canceling pre-orders and shouting at them to stop being greedy. Really? Optional payment to get stuff faster is bad? Might I stress “Optional”??? You’re going to not buy a game because somewhere in the code is a “pay” button?

What do you think?

These are just my OPINIONS so please don’t judge me for my OPINIONS thank you ^-^. But honestly, is it just because I’m a developer that I’m siding with developers here? Or am I simply not in the AAA industry so I don’t expect AAA quality? What is making gamers nowadays so focused on graphics? Why are they so spoiled?

It seems like I just woke up today and everybody was angry at people in my profession. Or maybe they’re angry at publishers. Either way, there’s nothing good in the comments anymore, just hate. Hate and strong opinions. I’d love to know what you guys think! (P.S. I don’t know everything about these incidents, so I may be wrong about the opinions of some players)

And soon I will start posting more about my upcoming game Thanks for reading!

Due to school and personal drama and other projects I have been absent from the game developer gig for a while. While I’ve stopped making smaller games and doing game jams I have been working on larger, non-game related projects.

Unfortunately I do not have screenshots to post, only this to say: Hopefully soon I will be back in the business when I have more time and motivation to do game Jams. Currently, I lack the motivation to host a mini LD which I am supposed to do in a couple of months. If things aren’t looking good, I might give up my placement. In that case, any one of you can take it… Or maybe I will do a contest or something 😉

Anyways, what I have been working on are short films, animations, larger game projects that will never be complete… etc. I might make a post soon about what I learned recently with third person game development and animation…. Sorry for being such a downer lol

I just finished my LD27 entry!!! It’s called Defense of the Zorion! You have to defend your ship from enemies by using first person shooting and strategic turret placement!! You have 10 seconds for each wave and between waves you have to run back and forth to unlock more turrets and weapons!!! I also included a ton of Easter Eggs and references to my previous LD’s 😉

So once again this game will be first person, however now I’ll be stressing upgrades and secrets and things to do within the game. You have 10 seconds for each wave, and each one gets progressively harder. You have to combine your own shooting with strategic turret placement in order to stop the waves of enemies!

I also was able to throw in a good amount of easter eggs and references that you will get if you have played any of my previous ludum dare games 😉 So far this game is coming along on schedule and it should be complete by tomorrow!!!!! 😀

This game will probably be first person (like usual). However, this time around I want to do something different… something that makes it more playable/replayable. Not just a simple puzzle game / platformer… I want to be able to play multiple systems against each other… if that makes sense… anyways expect me to be TRYING (may not succeed) at making a unique game.

The comments said the problem was with the visuals. I agree. But visuals aren’t everything. I mean my game had more animation and gameplay options then Receiver (by Wolfire games) and that was one of the very first games to be Greenlit. The problem is people just look at the graphics. They just look at the “original” parts of a game, and even though I spent 300+ hours on complicated animation matrices, coding, and AI development, the visuals weren’t enough for people to take interest.

You know it bothers me when games with screenshots like this:

Get more votes then games with screenshots like this:

I picked a random game to compare with mine. While the random game had somewhat impressive backgrounds and an interesting character design, they showed 30 seconds of repetitive walking gameplay. Looked like they had about 3 animations. And then they showed off some of their models and called it a game. And yet people are 300x more excited for it because their design is similar to that of popular mmos. Their game probably won’t have complicated animation matrices, AI systems with multiple states, and stealth scenarios that put you crawling inches from enemies. Their game probably doesn’t even have any complete levels. Now which game sounds more promising to you?

A lot of comments said “You shouldn’t have put this game out in Alpha. You should’ve waited until Beta.” Well take a look at the game above. 30 seconds of walking gameplay, remember? Yet people weren’t even bothered by the fact that their systems weren’t developed at all and all they could show off was a walk-through demo. This has started to make me think… Do people base development progress on visuals? Because it doesn’t make any sense for people to just skim over mine because the graphics didn’t look so good. Did people even see what my game was about?

Now call me a baby for complaining like this, but Greenlight is a flawed system. Personally I’d like to see how much work was actually put in to some of these entries. And by how much work I mean how many hours did they spend working on art and how many hours did they spend on actual gameplay. Sure the two go hand in hand, but people only look at the art, so what’s the point in working hard on the other part?

I took the game down from Greenlight. Sorry, but the results have just proven too horrible for now. I don’t want to just trash 300+ hours of work, yet I see no other option. Sure, I could increase the visuals of the game. But that’s something I’ve always been bad at and it’ll probably take another 100 hours or something to properly do. By that point who knows what people will think. They probably still won’t like the graphics, and by then they’ll start worrying about the gameplay or something. Overall it’s just too risky for me to put any more time into this game. There’s a chance it could be accepted after an aesthetics overhaul, but that’s a chance I don’t know if I want to take. Now that I know what people are looking for, it shouldn’t be hard to develop a new game, it’ll just take a really long time…

Now I haven’t got much positive feedback so far, and the votes for Greenlight are way in the negative, but I’d ask you to consider voting yes because this was made by one person (me) in my free time. If it continues to do poorly then I’ll consider either doing an aesthetic overhaul or scrapping the project. If the game can’t be played by anyone then there’s not much point in developing it. :/

Anyways please consider voting and I’ll write more about this once more results come in!

In my new action adventure game, one of the biggest goals I want to accomplish is to tell a compelling story. At first, this seemed like a difficult thing to accomplish… being that I didn’t have time to render and model a lot of cutscenes while perfectly lip syncing dialogue… In the end, I came to the conclusion of having little cutscenes and instead telling story through mechanics and visuals. How do you do that? Seems impossible, right? actually, if you go the basics, it’s quite simple.

Mechanics. Text can tell stories. Audio can tell stories as well. Together these become vital aspects in presenting an easy-to-make story mechanic. Character biographies, journals, radio messages, all of these can easily show story without complicated cutscenes or even modeling other characters. However, this can get repetitive… The trick is telling the right story in the most interesting way.

Word Choice. My original idea for the story of this game was a unique, slow paced action adventure that had the main character going through mostly the same locations over and over again, just in different scenarios. I quickly realized this was a mistake. You don’t need a ton of side characters… you need a few main ones that can do different things to help advance the story. It’s important to make sure all dialogue somehow progresses the story, and that the dialogue is from main characters. I want this game to be dramatic. I want to create scenarios that are unique as well as intriguing, and I want them to all affect the main character in some way.

Making it Interesting. Start off with a story. Then think “How can I change this in the most dramatic way possible while still making it believable and understandable?” It’s hard to put what I’m trying to say into words… but basically you need to create dramatic suspense. Characters need to be at an even match, they all need to have something to hide, they all need to have weaknesses and strengths.

Sorry that jumbled mess haha, here’s the LAST hint before the official announcement of my new game:

Note: That is NOT the main character 😉 or is it????

Let’s see if you can guess the title! 😀 Hopefully next time I’ll have the official announcement ready

For my new action adventure game I began to work with crowds and realistic human characters to serve as main characters. At first, I thought detailing and animating all these would be difficult… and it was. In fact, I’ve really only made a few models so far, and the “crowd” I had originally planned looks like it’s just going to take too much work to be a big part of the gameplay I had intended. Live and learn, I guess. This, however, didn’t stop me from modeling main characters for the game’s story. I found out that even a few simple face bones can convey a large amount of emotions. This model only uses 5 face bones – two for brows, two for mouth corners, and one jaw bone:

The eyes aren’t textured in this image. 😛 Lip syncing for my game is actually proving quite easy — because the individual sound sources play independently, using code I can detect the volume of just one character’s voice file and then smoothly move the jaw bone to represent the audio data. Sure, it doesn’t look the best, but with a little more tweaking it will be at the quality I want for the finished version of the game. (At the very least his mouth will move in sync with the words) 😛

The game is coming along very well, and I’ve been working on making some interesting levels and gameplay. Lastly here’s another hint on the theme and title:

Only one more after this before the big announcement! (Hopefully 😛 )

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare! (Sorry for writing this in the middle of a Mini-LD haha)

So this game is turning out pretty well, I’m happy with how it controls and plays. I’m just about to start the heavy duty work on the combat system, so be prepared for a more action-oriented experience. Furthermore, I finished the cinematic trailer for the game. However I’m worried (seeing the other stuff on Steam Greenlight) that my game is not up to par yet. I know it probably has something to do with the art assets, but I’m no good at making super detail environments.

As a question for you peeps out there, what’s a good way to show off a game that doesn’t have impressive art assets yet? So far I’m drawing a blank. Thanks if you can answer, and here’s another hint on the theme and title of the game 😉

This game, as always, started with the typical “fly up a wall” climbing system. This worked fine, but I knew I wanted to allow the player to reach higher places. I started doing some research and it turned out the best method for a climbing system was triggers — invisible “hot spots” that detect when the player is inside them. From that I was able to detect when a player was near a climbable object, and then disable the entire movement controller and hand over movement to special custom-made climbing controller. The details from there get a bit complicated, but so far this character is the most complex I’ve ever done in a game, with (right now) 5 layers of collision boxes, 3 state controllers, over 20 animation matrices, and more than 60 basic animations. I’ll do a more detailed write up (and maybe a video) about development once the game is announced.

And finally, here’s another hint on the title and theme of the game, to keep you on your toes:

Remember you can follow me on twitter @RobProductions : https://twitter.com/RobProductions